Both these aliases use the long format by default, with colors, and adding slashes at the end for directories (and other characters for other type of files, see {{{man ls}}} for a complete explanation).

**PLEASE NOTE** While this is nice to have these options applied automatically while typing commands on a command line, the {{{color=always}}} can be a pain in the neck when running shell scripts (or one-liner) use with caution, and, in case of trouble, make sure you type: {{{ls --color=never}}}, for instance.

Same thing, but only for the {{{grep}}} command:

{{{ alias grep="grep --color=always" }}}

This makes the grep output nicely colored and very useful (this comes straight from Suse Linux, by the way)

Next, make sure all man pages are taken into account:

The following {{{export}}} command makes sure all the man pages of the software you compile on your Slackware machine can be taken into account by the {{{man}}} command:

{{{ export MANPATH=/usr/local/share/man:$MANPATH }}}

Finally, to rebuild the entire {{{whatis}}} database, make sure you have the same values in the {{{MANPATH}}} of root profile, and issue the following command as root:

{{{ # makewhatis -w }}}

Now, the {{{man}}} command will properly display man pages for software compiled on your machine and both {{{apropos}}} and {{{whatis}}} will display information about software compiled in {{{/usr/local/}}}.

Nothing really earth-shattering here, but it's nice to have on a Slackware machine!